Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson

Author:Lynne Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

On a blazingly hot day in August 1941, the British vice consul in the Spanish city of Bilbao was roused from his afternoon nap. He must return to the consulate at once, he was told. A group of Allied escapees had just arrived from France.

At the consulate, he found four men and a petite, dark-haired young woman dressed in blue fisherman’s trousers. The woman, who spoke French and identified herself as Andrée de Jongh, acted as their spokesman and leader. The men, she explained, were a Scottish soldier left behind at Dunkirk and three Belgian officers who wanted to join their country’s forces in Britain.

Many other British servicemen were still hiding in Belgium, the twenty-four-year-old de Jongh added. Some, like the Scot, were survivors of the fight for France and the Low Countries; others were British pilots and crewmen shot down on recent bombing missions. In the past few months, she had set up an escape line through Belgium and France, manned mostly by friends of hers, to help these men get back to England. If the British government would give her money to help pay for the line—for mountain guides, safe houses, food, and rail fares—she could bring out many more. But, she made clear, the line would have to remain under her control.

Although the men who accompanied her verified de Jongh’s story, the vice consul was somewhat skeptical. How could this slip of a girl organize such a complex operation on her own? More specifically, how had she managed to get these men across the dizzying heights and fast-flowing rivers of the Pyrenees—a dangerous and grueling trek for the most experienced outdoorsman?

Nonetheless, he finally came to believe her. In a cable passing on her request to London, he described de Jongh, who was known as Dédée, as “a girl of radiant integrity, as well as something of a beauty and physically hard as nails.” His message was sent to MI9, a small, clandestine agency (and subsection of MI6) created in late 1940 to act as a liaison with British prisoners of war and to help rescue Allied servicemen trapped behind enemy lines. MI6’s Claude Dansey, convinced that de Jongh was a German plant intent on sending enemy agents into Britain, initially rejected her proposal. But Lieutenant Colonel James Langley, the twenty-five-year-old head of MI9’s escape section, supported her, and in the end the British government agreed to finance her operation—a shoestring venture that would soon evolve into the most important Allied escape network in western Europe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.